Dear God (A Monologue)

“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.”

First, the 'our father' bit has always bothered me. I have enough issues with my own father without adding an all-powerful celestial being to the psychological mix. Oh, and three and a half centuries worth of misogyny and sexual oppression doesn't help your case, you know? But enough with the sermonizing. Let's move on. (Yeah, I thought you'd like that 'sermonizing' bit.)

I don't know, I've been thinking about you – and your ideas, or whatever you want to call them – a lot lately. This is due at least partly to Mr Dawkins. I'm sure you've heard about his book. It has some nasty things to say about you, and your ideas, or whatever you want to call them.

Myself, I hate the guy. He's elitist, he's flippant, he ends every sentence with a smirk. He doesn't see any merit in the various philosophies that have been built to accommodate and validate your existence. In fact, he thinks that anyone who has ever believed in you is kind of an idiot. Or, at the least, prisoner to a mass delusion that has endured since the beginning of recorded human history. But.

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.”

Heaven. Shangri-la. Valhalla. Elysium. Every culture has a religion and a god, a pretty picture of heaven and an ugly picture of hell. It always struck me that this uniformity – and the corresponding similarity of so many myths – meant that there had to be something to this god thing. I don't know if I have much in common with the ancient Egyptians, but I do know that the Christian mythos that surrounds me is remarkably similar to the stories of Osiris, not to mention Adonis and Baldr. I see an obvious continuum. Doesn't this mean that there must be some truth to the myths? Each story can be interpreted as fable, allegory, or symbol, but the ultimate truth of each – and the truth that the history of human thought has given us – is this: God exists, and we have known about Him since the beginning, intuitively. Given the world in which we live, we construct different stories to explain how he works, but the song remains the same: God exists, intuitively.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

One of the arguments against god – and I'm not sure if this is the strongest or the weakest argument – is the 'if God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, why does he let bad things happen?' question. Pretty compelling stuff.

The Spanish Inquisition. The Holocaust. Jonestown. Rwanda. John Wayne Gacy. Slavery. There's more. Make your own list.

The Bible explains this away with original sin, and with the terrible punishment of free will. Seems like a poor excuse for what could be interpreted as simple neglect and lack of interest on the almighty Creator's part.

“And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.”

Okay, I've avoided talking to you directly for two sections now. I'm trying to figure some things out, things that make me feel uncomfortable, things that scare me, things that I fear may actually release me from the awful torment of belief. Forgive me father, for I have sinned.

I think I may be an atheist. I think that you may not exist. I think you may be nothing but symbol – a potent and powerful symbol, yes – but a symbol nonetheless. I think I have been convinced of your non-existence. I think you may be the product of a human desire to explain, quantify, validate. A human need to feel bigger and more significant than a grain of sand drifting across a desert. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”, indeed.

“For thine is the kingdom,”

It's my kingdom, though, isn't it? Why am I always being told that it belongs to you, that everything and everyone who ever was and ever will be belongs to you, and you are a jealous and angry god, and you will not be denied, and I will do as I have been told by a book written over the course of centuries, a book in which a father is willing to kill his own son on an order by you, simply to prove that you are the only god, the one and only father, the father, son, and Holy Ghost all rolled into one convenient ethereal package.

Why do I need a set of arbitrary rules written thousands of years ago to live my life morally, today, here, now? I know the difference between right and wrong, and I've never needed a preacher to teach me how to distinguish between the two. My mother, a Catholic who left the Church at the age of thirteen, has always told me to be a good person. That's it. Be good to people, and, well, people won't always be good to you, but you will never go wrong.

“and the power,”

Fuck the power! Listen, God; I've talked a lot of shit about you over the years. I don't like what people, for centuries, have done in your name. I don't like that people use you to validate their xenophobia and fear. I don't like the hold you have over the imagination of 90% of the world's population. You're the punchline to a damn tragic joke.

I've talked a lot of shit about you, and I've wavered and called myself agnostic, but I've always, deep inside the secret heart of me, believed. I've prayed to you in my worst moments, and I thought you answered my prayers every time. I'm not dead, right? I'm not living in the gutter, I have a job, family and friends who love me and care for me. So you must have been there, inside or outside my head, watching, listening, helping, guiding.

But now I'm not so sure.

Mr Darwin made you irrelevant 150 years ago, but people continued to believe. Today, Mr Dawkins says you are a cultural meme, a bit of flotsam in the collective unconscious, a mutated gene, a by-product of evolution. Nothing more.

“and the glory,”

Dear god, I think I may be an atheist. I think I may be ready to take a huge leap into the unknown. Into a place where there is no celestial guidance, only the wonders of nature and science and measurable facts. There is still love and transcendence and meaning, mind you. But you're not there, and the heavenly choir is silenced, and most of human history is mistaken in its belief, but it doesn't matter. Because truth – and facing the truth that you will never be found – is beauty, and beauty is truth, and that is all.

“for ever and ever.

Amen.”

Good-bye.